An effective strategy to distribute the load and thus improve scalability is organizing the participants in a tree in combination with cryptographic schemes such as multi signatures[1]} or aggregated signatures[2]}.
This way, votes can be verified and aggregated as they are relayed up the tree to the leader, effectively spreading the computational load over the internal nodes. The leader can then verify and aggregate the result at a fraction of the computational cost, and disseminate it down the tree, evenly distributing bandwidth usage.
Systems such as Byzcoin[1]} and Motor[4]} leverage this design to offer better load balancing properties than the centralized approach proposed by HotStuff.
